Then so is Jesus Christ! We find similar truths expressed in the wonderful prologue of John's gos pel (1:1-4). The second thing to consider is Christ's wonderful condescension. Christ had been above all men and angels, and yet He became lower than both man or angels in love for all humanity as well as in obedi ence to His own heavenly Father. There was no death to which Christ was not willing to go for you and me. Can you imagine the scene that must have taken place in heaven on the eve of His birth in Bethle hem? God is omniscient but the angels are not. The Bible tells us that there are certain aspects of salvation which these ministering spirits do not understand. Perhaps there were rumors in the celestial courts of Christ's de scent to earth. What a revelation that He was going to enter human history as a baby through the womb of Mary. Would He appear in a blaze of light, bursting onto the Palestinian countryside? He could have appeared as a mighty gener al, marching into pagan Rome. He could have been revealed as a man of absolute wealth and power. Yet, the Bible says that when He came there was not any display of glory other than that of God's creation in the heavens. Instead, He will ingly laid aside His robes of glory, which were His for all eternity, and became a baby in the arms of a poor mother in a Far Eastern col ony of the Roman empire. No wonder the angels burst into such a crescendo of song that even the shepherds heard them on the Pal estinian hills that night.
than he did in the city of Jerusa lem. He is presenting, in a general way, what he knew to be the ac cepted teachings of all Christian churches of that day. Here we have a chain of asser tions about our Lord made within some 30 years of His death. These declarations give us on the one hand the fullest possible assurance that Christ was a man. He was a man in stature, circumstance and experience, and particularly in the sphere of His relationship to God the Father. We are also assured, in precisely the same tone, that He is genuinely divine and completely God. The verses bring us to the foundation of the early Christian faith, as well as of our own. In Philippians 2:5-11 we have the clear teaching of the absolute deity of Christ, His pre-existence, His equality with God the Father, His virgin birth, His true humanity, His voluntary death on the cross, the certainty of His ultimate tri umph over evil, and the promi nence of His coming rule and reign. There is no evolution to these Biblical doctrines. The early Church believed them from be ginning to end. There were often advances in the direction of a ful ler understanding of their signifi cance, yet who could fully expound on the depths of their riches? The first statement we want to consider is in reference to Christ's pre-incarnation existence. Paul tells us that before the virgin birth, Jesus was in the form of God and was always God's equal. These words do not mean that God is a material form, but only that Jesus Christ possessed all of God's vir tues and attributes. Is God omnis cient, omnipresent, omnipotent?
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